The High School 'Performance'

I have had three experiences with Shakespeare (and by experiences I mean reading and study of Shakespeare). These experiences are:
Romeo and Juliet freshman year of high school
Macbeth senior year of high school
A Midsummer Night's Dream freshman year of high school
Now, for each of these plays it seemed that there were certain commonalities in how we studied them.  Often we would read aloud or listen to recordings of the plays with intermittent explanations and walkthroughs by the teacher or instructor.  Furthermore in 2 out of three of these studies with Shakespeare we had some sort of performance.  There is one in particular that I would like to share.

And that is my experience with memorized(quite terribly too) performance of Act 2 Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet from the beginning of the scene all the way up to line 84.  This scene (as many of you will know) is the famous balcony scene, where they profess their love for each other. Now the thing I would like to say on this horrid thing for a high school freshman (who would willingly memorize lines at that age?) is that our teacher wanted us to become excited about it and try to perform it with emphasis and enthusiasm.

The problem with this is that flowery language and professing love is difficult and embarrassing for any teenager and proves to be troublesome because of a little thing called 'we're in high school and we do not want to put ourselves out there where we could possibly be ridiculed and taken down by our fellow classmates'.  Something many teenagers face. And so with my performance and with almost everybody else's performance of this it was more of a regurgitation of the words rather than an excited and informed performance of a section of Act 2 Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet.